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iWatch concept design by Nickolay Lamm

The iWatch has replaced the iTV as the most likely new product line we are all expecting from Apple. The company supposedly has a team of 100 working on it and Samsung is apparently nipping at its heels.

Nickolay Lamm, a young marketing consultant from Pittsburgh, has been digging into some of Apple's patents that others have overlooked in terms of this rumored iWatch to fuel his speculations about what it might look like. One patent, illustrated in the concept rendering above, shows a novel iTunes UI called Spiral. Before we dismiss a circular form factor as wildly incompatible with everything else in iOS, it is worth considering Steve Jobs' near-death obsession with spirals and rounded forms in the later Apple stores (particulalrly the spiral staircase in the midtown New York store that Jobs patented himself and the barrel vaults of the new Plao Alto flagship store.)

Consideration number two would be the advances in the rendering of 3D interfaces using JavaScript, as in the forthcoming Famo.us framework. The introduction of a radical and game-like form of navigation would be a clear signal that Apple is still in the leadership role when it comes to interface design.

Consideration number three is the amusing detail that Lamm chose to base his concept on the the Ikepod Geneve Horizon series of watches designed by one of Jony Ive's best friends, Marc Newson—one of which Ive wears himself. So if we accept that Ive is the sucessor to Jobs with the title of design-obsessive-in-chief, then looking at his own choices in wrist wear becomes relevant.

Most substantial, though, is the correlation with the thinking of Yale Computer Science Professor David Gelernter. In his recent essay in Wired, The End of the Web, Search, and Computer as We Know It, he writes, "The space-based web we currently have will gradually be replaced by a time-based worldstream. It’s already happening, and it all began with the lifestream, a phenomenon that I (with Eric Freeman) predicted in the 1990s and shared in the pages of Wired almost exactly 16 years ago."

Gelernter says that "today, the most important function of the internet is to deliver the latest information, to tell us what’s happening right now." (Echoes of Rushkoff's Present Shock!) The ascendance of stream-based social media over document-based static content is an inkling of this, but he sees all of the internet's data being turned into a common time-based format. The collection of all of these lifestreams will be the worldstream, the totality of all that we are (digitally, at least.)

We will navigate this river of content with stream-browsers that will aggregate and filter our own unique blend of inputs. "No matter how fast it seems," Gelernter writes, "most search is a waste of time.… Instead of doing an endless series of separate searches, we tune the knobs on our stream-browser to continuously feed us just the information we need."

Streams, knobs, tunings—these are analog things. What an interesting full-circle, as it were! For most of the century-long history of the wrist watch, it has been a circular affair, reinforcing the cyclical nature of time. Gelernter's time-based metaphor for content actually brings the analog back into the digital.

I am on familiar territory here, which is part of the reason why Lamm's fanciful prototype held my attention. My senior project in design school was a book about the varieties of graphic representation titled… analog/digital. And what is interesting about Lamm's selection of the Spiral UI patent is that, in fact, the spiral in dimensional space is able to represent a longer lifestream in a smaller space than any linear representation.

This would have never occurred to me looking at the patent drawing, and even Lamm's concept rendering itself struck me as gimmicky at first glance. But when combined with Gelernter's idea of stream-based content, it becomes surprisingly compelling.

Whatever else the iWatch might be—a second screen to our iPhones, a validator of our identity, an alway-on sensor of our vital signs—it could also be this, the tuning gage of our information stream. Gelernter's Lifestreams app is working software in invitation-only beta now (see video below). Notice the turning of the "scrubber wheel" in the lower right of the interface to navigate the time sequence. Looks like something you could do on a round watch face, eh?

What does Gelernter think of the iWatch as a medium for Lifestreams? "I think lifestreams (i.e., heterogeneous, searchable, time-symmetric realtime messaging streams) are perfect for an iWatch or any intelligent watch. What makes the iWatch idea interesting is not a computer on your wrist but a new kind of watch, a new interface to time. I want to look at this watch and see not only the current time but what's happening at this time—and what's just happened and just about to happen. It will be brilliant if the UI is right. I don't count on that, but it's not impossible either. Anyway, I don't think I've ever seen a more natural hardware-software fit than an intelligent watch and lifestreams."

It will be interesting to see if he is right, and if Apple, who first made its name through the elegance of its space-based interfaces will make its next big move into ones based on time.